How fast should a business respond to a new lead? What the studies measured

Where the "5-minute rule" comes from

Nearly every article about speed to lead traces back to two pieces of work by the same people.

The first is the Lead Response Management study, presented in October 2007 by Dave Elkington, the head of InsideSales.com, and Dr. James Oldroyd, who was then at the MIT Sloan School of Management. The second is a 2011 Harvard Business Review article, "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads," by Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and Elkington.

One thing to know before the numbers: InsideSales.com sold software for calling leads quickly. That does not make the research wrong, but it is the kind of thing you should be told. We sell a product in this area too, so the same caution applies to us. Both originals are linked under Sources.

What the 2007 study measured

The study's own summary says it examined three years of data across six companies that generate and respond to web leads, covering over fifteen thousand leads and over one hundred thousand call attempts. It asked one question: when should a company call a web lead to have the best chance of reaching and qualifying that person?

It defined its terms carefully. A "contact" was a call that connected with a live person. A lead was "qualified" when the person was willing to enter the sales process, which in some cases meant setting an appointment. Its findings on speed were:

• The odds of contacting a lead fell by over 10 times in the first hour.
• The odds of qualifying a lead fell by over 6 times in the first hour.
• Between 5 minutes and 30 minutes, the odds of contacting a lead dropped 100 times, and the odds of qualifying dropped 21 times.
• Between 5 minutes and 10 minutes alone, the odds of contact dropped 5 times.

It also looked at timing. Wednesday and Thursday were the best days to reach people, and 4 to 6 pm was the best time of day to make contact. The authors wrote that the effect of response time "dwarfed" both. If you want to see where your own gaps fall in the day, the 20-minute missed-call audit sorts a week of calls by hour.

What the 2007 study did not measure

This is the part that gets dropped when the numbers are passed around.

• Not sales. The study stops at "qualified." It does not report closed deals or revenue.
• Not phone calls coming in. Every lead was a web form. The study is about how fast a company calls out, not about callers who rang and got no answer.
• Not local service businesses. It was six companies using one vendor's calling system. The write-up says that vendor's customers were concentrated in mortgage and insurance.
• Not a rate you can plan on. "100 times" compares odds. The summary does not give the underlying percentages, so you cannot turn it into "X more jobs a month."
• Not recent. The data is from before 2007. People answered unknown numbers differently then.

None of this means speed does not matter. It means the honest claim is smaller: in that data, waiting made it much harder to get a person on the phone. For the money side, use your own figures, as shown in what a missed call really costs.

What Harvard Business Review added in 2011

The 2011 article looked at the other side: how fast companies actually respond. Its opening puts the finding in one sentence: "Our research shows that most companies are not responding nearly fast enough."

You will see specific figures from this article quoted all over the web, such as an average response time or a share of companies that never replied. The full article sits behind Harvard Business Review's paywall, and the public page shows only the introduction. We could not read those figures at the source, so we do not repeat them here. If you have a subscription, the link under Sources goes straight to it.

A good habit with any statistic like this: follow it back until you reach the people who collected the data. If the trail ends at another blog post, leave the number out.

What this means for a local business

A plumber, a roofer or a cleaning company is not a call center working a list of web forms. Still, three plain points carry over.

• The person is most reachable right after they reach out. They have the phone in their hand and the problem on their mind.
• They are probably contacting more than one business. When the study's authors filled in quote forms themselves, they got calls from several companies, the first within minutes and the last days later.
• A reply tomorrow is a different thing from a reply today. The steepest drop in that data came inside the first hour.

Fast does not have to mean a full conversation. A short, honest "we got your message, we will call you back this afternoon" tells the person they have been heard. Your options for the calls you cannot pick up are compared in answering service vs voicemail vs text-back.

How to measure your own response time

Your own number beats any study. It takes about twenty minutes.

1. Pick one normal week. Not a holiday week, not your busiest.
2. List every new enquiry. Web form entries, emails, chat messages and missed calls from numbers you do not know.
3. Write down two times for each: when it came in, and when a person from your business first replied.
4. Sort them into four piles: under 5 minutes, under an hour, same day, and next day or never.
5. Look at the last pile. Those are the ones to fix first. Note what time of day they arrived.

Most owners find the slow replies cluster in the same places: on a job, at lunch, after closing. That tells you what to change. The missed-call audit has a sheet for the phone side, and the response time quiz gives a quick read if you do not have a week of records.

Ways to reply faster without hiring

Start with what costs nothing.

• Forward unanswered calls to a second person. Steps for the main carriers are in how to forward business calls.
• Send form entries to your phone, not to an inbox you check at night.
• Set two call-back times a day and say them in your voicemail greeting, so callers know when to expect you.
• Keep one list. Leads spread over voicemail, email and a notebook are the ones that get a reply on day three.

Tools come after that. NewFrontDesk puts web chat and form entries into one lead inbox and emails you when a new one arrives. Our missed-call text-back is built but in test mode: it sends no texts until carrier registration is approved. We say so because a guide about honest numbers should not oversell its own product.

Sources

• Lead Response Management study summary, Oldroyd and InsideSales.com, 2007 (PDF copy hosted by Mortech)
• Harvard Business Review: The Short Life of Online Sales Leads (March 2011; introduction is public, full text needs a subscription)
• Brigham Young University ScholarsArchive: record for the 2011 article (authors, volume 89, page 28)
• InsideSales: the vendor's own 2009 description of the study

Sources read on October 9, 2026. The 2007 figures are quoted from the study's own summary; we have not seen its raw data. We are not affiliated with any company named here. General information, not business or legal advice.